journalism – St. Thomas Libraries Blog

Libraries, News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Political Science, Recently Read, Uncategorized

Where do you get your news?

It seems like, increasingly, we live in bubbles populated by people who agree with us. Our friends post their opinions on our Facebook pages and, if we’ve picked our friends carefully, it turns out we like everything they have to say. Most Americans say that they want to get their news from a source that has no political bias, though our sources for news and information tend to be from those who we’ve grown to trust, and the political slant of any publication is a matter of opinion. My “objective” source might be your “big liberal media.” Curious to know where OSF library users get their political information, we used our “white board conversation” method, and asked OSF Library users about their news diet last week. Our question was “Where do you get your political news?” and about 75 library users posted their answers on Post-it notes on the board. Obviously this is not a scientific survey, but interesting, nonetheless. (For more scientific data on this question, you should look at the Pew Research Center’s recent report on the news landscape. In fact, our results were very similar to what Pew found, especially for the young demographic of our library.)

CQ Researcher and Archives

Looking for original, comprehensive reporting and analysis on issues in the news? Look no further –well, of course, you should look further than just one resource, but this is a great place to start. There is content back to 1923 and as recent as last week BUT not in every topic. Birth control’s most recent entry is 2005 and high speed train’s is 2011. The CQ Researcher provides in-depth, unbiased coverage of lots of topics across many disciplines: health, education, economy, etc.

Reports, researched and written by journalists, are substantive, but not too long: they do not fall into the TLDR category (oh yes, we’re on to you!) at about 12,000-words. Each report follows a consistent format with overview and background, chronology and an assessment of the current state of affairs. Pro and con statements will help you look at the positions offered from ‘both sides,’ although most issues have more than two sides and some have only one side. Maybe after reading the content YOU can think of the third or ninth side. There may be maps and charts depending on topic.

Ways to navigate include browsing by topic; using tracker to see when the most recent content on your topic was updated oryou can go directly to the pros and cons section.

March 5, 2012 by